Black Helicopters Approach

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by Lisa
So there are unidentified federal agents picking up protesters in Portland?! The guiding principal of Republican governance: States rights above all else … except when I don’t agree with how you’re running things. Then we’re invading your city and teaching you radicals a lesson.
 
How long you think it’ll be before random psychopaths start dressing up like unidentified federal agents and rounding people up downtown? No one is going to believe the Trump administration when they swear they never kidnapped Uncle Frank. Hell, there’ll be a whole army of Trump supporters hitting the Army Surplus store for camo outfits and renting vans on election day.

Censorship?

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by Lisa

This may be a paranoid thought, but … a bunch of high-profile people’s Twitter accounts were hacked today, and the messages posted asked followers to send Bitcoin. Twitter shut down these accounts for a few hours.

There’s obviously a profit motive here — as of 11:30 today, they’ve garnered over 118k (and have been clearing the money out, so money isn’t just an unfortunate consequence of the hack).

The target list that is hyped includes a lot of big names, and it’s interesting to see which names seem to create the biggest bump in transactions to the wallet.

But the one that stands out to be is Joe Biden — and, yes, it looks like his account was hacked.

This looks like a proof of concept test to me. Now, it’s possible that Trump wasn’t hacked because it is so implausible that he’d be giving back to the community. But forcing the platform to shut down a bunch of accounts, including a number of your political opponents, is a brilliant approach to disrupting campaigning. Seems like a next level move from a government-sponsored intel group looking to interfere with elections after their troll accounts and advertising attempts get shut down.

Re-imagine the Police

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by Lisa

The defund movement suffers from a branding problem. There are a lot of people for whom ‘defund the police’ seems to mean ‘decent into anarchy’. Few are looking to cede all property rights, eliminate personal property, eliminate speed limits. To me, defunding the police means funding a new government organization staffed with social workers, psychologists, and mediators to handle the massive number of calls that don’t involve arrest. Possibly moving toward the UK idea of generally unarmed officials with a small group of armed police to respond to situations where armed police are actually needed. Personally, I’d have three groups — social-workers for mental heath issues / inter-personal relationship problems, non-armed responders (the trespassing call we put in a few weeks ago certainly didn’t need an armed guy responding — just someone with legal authority to remove the trespasser), and armed responders for dangerous situations. But that idea is hardly encompassed in the word “defund”.

I’ve been thinking reorganize might be a better phrase — reorganize the police. There’s a shared responsibility for public safety, and it would be beneficial that the two groups not be working at odds. I see St Petersburg “reimagining” the police to include a group of more social-work oriented police. I like that turn of phrase. It doesn’t address the awful historic roots of policing … but there are a lot of institutions in this country (government and business) with horrible pasts. I think an organization’s roots are far more acceptable if the current entity wasn’t exploitative, abusive, or colonialistic. United Fruit became Chiquita — their exploitations today are the problem! “Re-imagine” suggests there was something wrong with the original conceptualization that needs to be changed. By keeping the non-police responders under the same organization, the budget it retained (maybe even grown — move a lot of current funding over to social services, add a little more). And there’s no “but the anarchy” strawman.

Mid-stream

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by Lisa
Hospitals have been instructed to provide SARS-CoV-2 data to HHS instead of CDC. CDC falls under HHS so it’s a little like having the “parent company” handle something some subsidiary used to do. Which means the move isn’t as alarming as some people are making it out to be. The ‘parent company’ will authority to more readily mobilize resources, and moving responsibility for a project to the parent company can signify the importance of the project.
Which isn’t to say I think it’s a good move … from an IT perspective, CDC has the infrastructure in place to handle the reporting & publicizing of data. About the best case would be a reorganization — same people supporting the same thing, but adding in the uncertainty of a new organizational structure (new processes, new priorities, a new person’s take on what you should be doing). If HHS is taking over that system, there’s opportunity for failure because the new people don’t know what the old people know. If HHS is bring up a new system, there’s a LOT of opportunity for failure because, well, it’s a new system. Mid-disaster isn’t when I’d want to change my reporting process. Maybe run two in parallel because the new one is going to provide some great new insights. But I would never say “hey, everyone, stop using A and move over to B on Thursday”.
Additionally, it doesn’t inspire confidence that the HHS website has been throwing a lot of connection errors since the announcement. I expect it’s a load problem as people begin to learn what HHS is … but ‘the guy who cannot keep his website online will be taking over statistics for us’ is not exactly the direction I’d move critical reporting.

First Harvest – 2020

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by Lisa

There are green tomatoes ripening, the beans are growing on the bush beans … and we’ve got cucumbers! I knew there were flowers with little proto-cucumbers growing. Anya and I were grilling dinner tonight, and I noticed a large diameter end of a cucumber nestled in the center of the plant. Pushed aside a few leaves and wow, that’s a large cucumber. I held Anya’s hand so she could lean over into the center of the plant and she found four more! There are still a lot of flowers and cucumbers starting too.

SCCM Shows “No items found”

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by Lisa

The Windows 10 1909 upgrade was rolled out at work, and I got the “if you don’t get this installed, I’m gonna tell your manager” e-mail. Which is odd since all of this ‘stuff’ is supposed to be doing its thing in the background. But whatever. So I opened the “Software Center” and was told there were no items found under applications. Which … possible, I guess. I don’t use IT-deployed software that isn’t part of the stock image. But clicking over to “Operating Systems” (where the update should be found) also yielded “No items found”.

I know enough about Microsoft applications & AD to know I’m on cached credentials when I initiate the VPN connection. No idea what the refresh period is like, so I lock and unlock my workstation to ensure I’ve got an active authentication token. But that didn’t help — still no items found. I had to go into the “Control Panel”, open “Configuration Manager” as an administrative user, and select the ‘Actions’ tab. There were two — “Machine Policy Retrieval & Evaluation Cycle” and “User Policy Retrieval & Evaluation Cycle”. I ran both of them. A few minutes later, I went back into the Configuration Manager utility & found a bunch of things on the actions tab.

I ran all of them — nothing changed. Then let the computer sit for a few hours (I’m certain less than a few hours would have sufficed, but I had other things to do). Ran all of the actions again, and a notice popped up that I have new software available. Sigh! Now I’m downloading the six gig update — a process that should be done in a few hours. But at least I’ll have the update installed before the deadline.

In the process, I also discovered that the CCM logs have been moved from SYSTEM32/SYSWOW64 and are now located at %WINDIR%\CCM\logs

Kid Coding

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by Lisa

I’ve seen a number of articles written by developers and IT folks promoting how they won’t be teaching their young kid to code. Of all of the arguments against teaching kids to code, the only one that really strikes me is the fact that a lot of parents don’t know how to code themselves. Now, I expect it is possible to not know French but manage to cobble together some approach to teaching your kid French. It’s a lot easier (and the results are apt to be better) if you actually know some French. My decision to teach my daughter to code doesn’t mean it’s a vital skill that every kid needs to learn to prepare them for future jobs. But, since it is something I do, it is something I share with my daughter. If she weren’t interested in what is going on beyond getting it all typed in, I’d stop. But she’s interested in exploring beyond what the coding book tells her to type. As we created a little character on the screen, Anya wondered if we could make different little figures. At different locations. In different sizes. In different colors. In using Scratch, she develops characters and game play.

Why teach a seven year old kid to code? Why do you teach your kids anything apart from the mandatory school curriculum? Working on the car? She can help and learn a bit about how vehicles work. I replaced the tube on my bicycle tire, and she helped. She was aware that bicycle tires had replaceable tubes that could explode on you … which was useful knowledge when she blew out her own tube. She sews with me — embroidery and a machine — because being able to patch clothes saves having to replace things as frequently. Mowing the lawn – she’s aware that a house with a lot of land requires work and knows how to safely operate both the push and riding mowers. Gardening – she knows where food comes from, how to grow her own, and how much work actually goes into feeding the country. She’ll participate in chicken keeping – somewhat so she knows where eggs come from and the amount of work that goes into egg production, but also because pets are fun (and our chickens will certainly be more socialized with her involvement). We share all sorts of activities with our daughter because we enjoy them. Some intrigue her, some don’t. But how do you learn where your interests are if your exposure is limited to reading and math for the first decade, then science and history for the next almost decade?

All of that provides useful, practical knowledge. And learning to code is certainly useful and practical. But the utility of such knowledge, the practicality of such knowledge isn’t the reason I am teaching my daughter to code. Or, for that matter, the reason I’ve taught her anything else at home. These activities involve deductive reasoning, analytical thought, problem solving, research skills, or accepting instruction from others. All of which are generally useful in life.

Statistical Coverup

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by Lisa
I keep encountering people who cite the fact that “only” half a percent of kids who get SARS-CoV-2 are dangerously ill. A small percentage of a very large number is still *a large number*.
 
The Department of Education estimated 50,800,000 public school students started the 2019-2020 school year. School admission rates have been trending up, but 2019 is the latest available data. Data from the CDC puts ICU admittance for children infected with SARS-CoV-2 at 0.58% (between 0.58% and 2%, but I’ll use the lower number since I haven’t encountered an ‘only two percent’ argument).
 
If only 1% of the kids who enter public school get infected, that’s over 2,500 kids in the ICU. If 5% get infected, that’s over 14,000 in the ICU. I doubt anyone would make the argument “Schools should re-open because only 14k kids are going to end up in the ICU”.

Aced

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by Lisa
Worries me that Trump considers “acing” the cognitive test somehow indicative of fitness to serve as president.
 
When I’ve been in the room with people getting that test, I remember a few questions standing out — I don’t generally know the date (I know it’s Sunday & I don’t need to go to work, but had to check the bottom of my screen to see it is the 12th). When I wasn’t working, I didn’t always know the day of week either. I traveled for business & often had to check the keyring for my hire car to know where I was (and what I was looking for in the carpark). None of these were *hard* — I could easily tell you I have no idea.
 
But I don’t remember any occasion where I thought “oh, great, she passed … she’s ready to go back to mentoring graduate students” or “awesome, she’s going to be able to finish that new widget design”. Or even “great, she can drive home today”.